How to Measure Women's Wellbeing at Work: A Practical Guide for HR, with Survey Questions

Measure two things: how employees feel (stress, anxiety, burnout) and whether they use and value the support you offer. Use short, repeatable questions, keep results aggregated and private, and ask before and after any program or initiative.

Key takeaways

• Measure wellbeing across three dimensions: stress, anxiety, and burnout, plus participation and usefulness of any support on offer.
• Use a mix of validated scales (named for reference) and plain-language questions on a simple 0-10 or 5-point scale.
• Participation is always voluntary; results must be aggregated; groups smaller than 10 responses should never be reported separately.
• Ask before a program begins and again at the end to track change over time.
• Without a control group, survey results show association, not cause. Be honest about that when you share findings.

What Should HR Measure?

Wellbeing measurement in the workplace tends to collapse into a single annual engagement score. That's not enough, and it misses the dimensions that matter most for women, whose stress, anxiety, and burnout often present differently and are driven by different workplace factors than the generic employee average. (If you want context on why that gap exists, the burnout crisis has a gender problem that most HR programs still don't account for.)

A useful measurement framework covers two categories:

1. Subjective wellbeing (how employees feel)

• Stress levels
• Anxiety symptoms
• Burnout (personal and work-related)

2. Program participation and usefulness (whether the support you offer is working)

• Reach: what proportion of employees are aware of the support available?
• Activation: what proportion have used it at least once?
• Return: what proportion have used it more than once?
• Usefulness: do participants feel it actually helped?

The table below maps each dimension to a practical question format.

These are plain-language adaptations, not reproductions of copyrighted instruments. The validated scales referenced in the next section use specific wording that should be checked against the original publications before use.

What Survey Questions Measure Employee Stress and Burnout?

The questions below are ready to copy into a survey tool. They draw on the structure and logic of three widely used self-assessment scales: the GAD-7 (Spitzer et al., 2006), the DASS-21 stress subscale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995), and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen et al., 2005). These are self-assessment tools, not diagnostic instruments. They tell you how a group is feeling; they do not replace clinical assessment.

Important: If you want to use the exact wording from any of these scales, check the original publications and licensing terms before reproducing items. The questions below are plain-language adaptations for workplace use.

Stress and anxiety (6 questions)

Use a 0-4 frequency scale: 0 = never, 1 = rarely, 2 = sometimes, 3 = often, 4 = always. Ask about the past two weeks.

1. How often have you felt unable to control the important things in your work?
2. How often have you felt nervous, anxious, or on edge?
3. How often have you had trouble relaxing after work?
4. How often have you felt irritable or easily frustrated?
5. How often have you felt a sense of dread about the working day ahead?
6. How often has it been hard to concentrate because of worry or tension?

Burnout (4 questions)

Use the same 0-4 frequency scale.

7. How often do you feel emotionally exhausted by your work?
8. How often do you feel worn out at the end of a working day?
9. How often do you feel that your work is draining your energy?
10. How often do you feel that you have nothing left to give at the end of the week?

Program usefulness (2 questions)

These use a different format and should be asked only of employees who have used a wellness benefit.

11. On a scale of 0-10, how useful has the support been for managing your stress or wellbeing at work?
12. Would you recommend this support to a colleague? (Yes / No / Not sure)

A note on scoring: For the frequency questions, a higher average score across the team indicates higher reported stress or burnout. Track the group average over time, not individual responses. A shift of 0.5 or more on the 0-4 scale across a group is generally meaningful; smaller shifts may reflect normal variation rather than a real change.

What Makes a Workplace Wellness Benefit Useful for Women?

Measuring whether a benefit is used is not the same as measuring whether it works. A program can have strong sign-up numbers and still fail to meet the actual needs of the women it was designed to support.

The most useful questions to ask are about fit, access, and relevance:

• Fit: Does the support address the things I actually struggle with at work?
• Access: Is it easy to use, available when I need it, and genuinely private?
• Relevance: Does it feel designed for someone like me, or does it feel generic?

These are worth asking directly in your survey. Two questions that work well:

"Does the wellbeing support available to you address the things you actually find difficult at work?" (Yes / Partly / No)

"Is there a type of support you wish your employer offered that is not currently available?" (Open text)

The open-text response here is often the most valuable data point in the whole survey. It surfaces needs that closed questions miss entirely, and it gives you a direct line to what women in your organization actually want, rather than what you assumed they needed.

One common finding: Women consistently report that support feels most useful when it is available outside of working hours, genuinely confidential (not routed through a manager or HR), and relevant to the specific pressures they face, including the emotional safety climate of the team they work in. A benefit that requires a referral, a waiting list, or a conversation with a line manager before access is granted will see lower activation rates among the employees who need it most.

How Is Employee Wellbeing Data Kept Private?

Mental health data is sensitive personal data. Under the UK GDPR and equivalent frameworks, it requires a higher standard of protection than general employment data. The ICO's guidance on workers' health information (published August 2023) is clear: wellbeing monitoring as part of an employer's initiatives must be entirely voluntary, and the employer's lawful basis for processing that data is typically consent.

The three non-negotiable rules

1. Participation is always voluntary. No employee should feel pressured to complete a wellbeing survey. State this explicitly in the survey introduction, and make clear that non-participation has no consequences.

2. Results are always aggregated. HR should never see individual responses. Report group averages only. This is not just good practice; it is the minimum required to maintain trust and, in most jurisdictions, to comply with data protection obligations.

3. Groups smaller than 10 are never reported separately. If a team, department, or demographic group has fewer than 10 respondents, suppress their results entirely. Reporting small-group data, even as an aggregate, can make individual responses identifiable.

What this means in practice

• State the privacy rules clearly before the survey opens, not buried in fine print.
• Use a third-party survey tool or platform that does not give HR access to raw individual responses.
• Set a data retention policy: decide in advance how long survey data is stored and who has access.
• If you are using a wellbeing app or digital program, check whether the provider separates individual-level data from employer-facing dashboards. Any provider that gives HR access to individual scores is not meeting the standard.

How Often Should HR Measure?

The most useful measurement cadence is before and after: run a baseline survey before a program or initiative begins, and repeat the same questions at the end. This gives you a comparison point.

Beyond that, a practical rhythm for most organizations looks like this:

Avoid over-surveying. Sending wellbeing surveys every month signals anxiety on the organization's part and creates survey fatigue. Once per program cycle, plus an annual pulse, is enough for most teams.

What Can HR Conclude from the Results?

This is where most wellbeing measurement goes wrong. Survey results are useful, but they are easy to over-interpret.

What you can conclude:

• The average reported stress, anxiety, or burnout level across your team at a given point in time.
• Whether those scores changed between the start and end of a program.
• Whether employees who used a benefit found it useful.
• Which types of support employees say they want but cannot currently access.

What you cannot conclude:

• That your program caused a change in scores. Without a control group (employees who did not have access to the program), you cannot separate the effect of the program from other things that changed over the same period.
• That low scores mean employees are fine. Disclosure stigma is real: many women underreport stress and burnout at work because they do not feel safe being honest, even on an anonymous survey.
• That high participation means the program is working. Reach and usefulness are different metrics. Measure both.

The honest framing: "Reported stress scores decreased by X points between the start and end of the program. We cannot attribute this solely to the program, but the direction of change is encouraging and will inform our next steps."

That kind of careful language is not a weakness. It is what builds credibility with leadership and trust with employees.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you measure employee wellbeing and mental health?

Measure two things in parallel: subjective wellbeing (how employees feel, using validated self-assessment scales as a reference point for your question design) and program effectiveness (whether the support you offer is reaching and helping people). Use short, repeatable questions on a frequency or rating scale, keep all results aggregated, and compare scores before and after any program or initiative.

How can companies make wellness benefits more useful to women?

Ask directly. An open-text question at the end of your survey ("Is there support you wish we offered that we currently don't?") consistently surfaces needs that pre-designed benefit packages miss. Beyond that, the most common barriers for women are access outside working hours, genuine confidentiality (not routed through a manager), and relevance to the specific pressures women face at work. Benefits that require a referral or a waiting period see significantly lower uptake among the employees who need them most.

How do wellness apps protect employee mental health data?

Under data protection law (including the UK GDPR), mental health data is special category data requiring explicit consent and strict access controls. A trustworthy wellness app should separate individual-level data from employer-facing reporting entirely: each user sees her own results, and the employer sees only aggregated group data. No individual scores, no identifiable responses. Check the provider's data processing agreement before rolling out any app to employees, and confirm that groups smaller than 10 are suppressed in any reporting dashboard.

How often should we run a wellbeing survey?

Once before and once after any program or initiative, to create a meaningful comparison. Add an annual pulse survey to track longer-term trends. Avoid monthly surveys: they create fatigue and signal organizational anxiety rather than genuine care.

Should wellbeing surveys be anonymous?

Yes, as a baseline. Anonymous surveys consistently return more honest responses on sensitive topics like stress and burnout. Beyond anonymity, make the privacy rules explicit before the survey opens: voluntary participation, aggregated results, and suppression of any group with fewer than 10 responses. Employees who trust the process are more likely to engage honestly, which makes the data more useful.

How Soula Approaches Measurement

The Soula program uses validated stress, anxiety, and burnout scales at the start and end of each participant's program. A psychologist selects and fixes the versions used and oversees the scoring methodology. Each participant receives her own results privately, so she can track her own progress. HR receives aggregated data only, with no access to individual scores or responses. Soula does not make outcome claims on behalf of employers: the data shows what participants reported, not what the program caused.